Introduction

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

            Tennyson’s In Memoriam was written as an elegy in the memory of Tennyson’s friend and prospective brother-in-law, Arthur Hallam, who died suddenly in 1833 while traveling in Vienna. The poem is written in 133 parts that contain a very broad range of emotions, topics and imagery, although the poem as a whole centers on grief over Hallam’s death. It was written over a period of seventeen years and went through a lengthy revision process before its publication in 1850, when it became immensely popular with both the general public and critics (“In Memoriam”). A British newspaper printed in 1851 praised Tennyson as “a bard presenting us but with his choicest thoughts, and those carefully, and at times elaborately, worked.  He has not . . . sent to the world’s tribunal his most careless versifyings, but . . . has suppressed all that a polished and fastidious taste and the most correct judgement could object to.” (“Literary Notices”) Decades later, T.S. Eliot also gave high praise, saying that in In Memoriam “Tennyson finds full expression” and his “technical competence is everywhere masterly and satisfying” (Eliot 242). This long-lasting popularity was due both to Tennyson’s skill as a poet and his ability to touch on enduring themes such as grief, faith, doubt, and comprehending the passage of time.

Although In Memoriam is structured as an elegy, it went beyond the kinds of elegies that Tennyson would have read from Romantic writers such as Percy Shelley (Sacks 392). Sacks claims that Tennyson’s elegy diverges from the older elegies not because of a lack of familiarity with them but because of the new Victorian views of religion. Throughout In Memoriam, Tennyson discusses his personal crisis of faith, reflecting the crisis of faith happening on a much larger scale during the Victorian period that began with the publication of Charles Lyell’s  Principles of Geology in 1833 (Black 197). Lyell’s book challenged the traditional Biblical account of the creation of the world and in turn caused doubts about the Bible as a whole (197). Although Tennyson maintains an attitude of faith throughout the entire poem, there are moments when he shows doubts. Tennyson never meant for his poem to be limited to his own experience, but instead he “claimed that the poem is actually the voice of all humanity, and not his own.” (“In Memoriam”) Although he drew heavily on his own experience with losing a close friend, during the revision process Tennyson worked to make the poem more generally applicable. In later drafts he removed some of the more specific references to Arthur Hallam and changed many of the pronouns to refer to him less directly (Shatto 4). By doing so, he opened up In Memoriam to be more applicable to everyone by being representative of human experience as a whole.

Tennyson also made In Memoriam applicable to a wide range of people because of the wide range of subject matter and imagery that he employs in the poem. He uses nature imagery throughout to illustrate the passage of time, connecting it both to the inevitability of death and the ability of time to soften grief. He also structures his poem around common events, such as Christmas celebrations and weddings. These common events make the poem as a whole more relatable, even to those that have never experienced such a traumatic loss.  The meter itself, iambic tetrameter, is also very accessible as it is often used in hymns. The overall structure and rhythm of the poem are relatable to readers without being cliché, allowing the audience to connect with it easily despite the depth of the subject matter.